The Pittsburgh Press (October 12, 1940)
SPENDING WISELY
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
Harriet Elliot, the only woman member of the National Defense Advisory Commission, hands out some good advice – to those who need it least – when she says that the chief patriotic duty of the housewife is to learn to spend her money wisely.
We hope Miss Elliot will sound off on the same note to her fellow members on the Defense Commission. We could do with more economy in high places. The politicians are spending money like drunken sailors and some of the tales of waste in the War Department make our hair stand on end. Yet Mrs. America is still getting the curtain lectures. And in spite of the fact that home management is just about the only enterprise carried on with a minimum of expense and a maximum of efficiency.
The average woman would be sunk deeper than a frog in a well if she conducted her household as statesmen carry on the national business. The thought of spending her way to prosperity has never entered her head, of course; if it did, her husband would quite properly knock it out again. She does understand enough about general finance to know that hoarding is folly, but she has not yet sufficiently mastered the new economy to feel that borrowing will put the family on Easy Street.
And evidently it is not intended that she shall practice the doctrines set forth by its advocates. The housewife is the one person in the land who must abide by Benjamin Franklin’s definition of thrift. Nobody wants her to start off on any newfangled economic tangents.
May we therefore amend Miss Elliot’s motion to say that, in our opinion, the patriotic duty of every American housewife is to see that those with the power to tax learn how to spend money wisely?
And let’s quit preaching to the housewife. Economy has already begun at home; the job is now to move it into wider spheres. What women save in their kitchens during a year is tossed off by Congress in a couple of minutes – and we pay them to bankrupt us. Here’s one housewife who is getting a little hot under the collar about it.